


Vaster Than Empires and More Slow

by Cloudfrost



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, I know you're all busy shipping thasmin and I support you in that decision, Light Angst, but please read my fic anyway, ramble-y
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-11
Updated: 2018-11-11
Packaged: 2019-08-22 07:00:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16593092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cloudfrost/pseuds/Cloudfrost
Summary: The Doctor travelled with humans to see the stars through their eyes.Missy was not a human, and when he was with her, he was remembered that while beautiful, a star was ultimately a process of destruction, and evolution the byproduct of extinction.A short, messy story in which everyone makes it through The Doctor Falls(somehow) and the Doctor and Missy travel together.





	Vaster Than Empires and More Slow

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a quote from 'To His Coy Mistress', the same poem that the title 'World Enough and Time' is taken from. It describes the Doctor and Missy and their relationship beautifully, to the point where I would suspect Steven Moffat of being a real time traveller if I thought he could write poems.

Travelling with her was different.

Travellers like the Doctor, over the millennia, became more or less accustomed to the universe in all its strangeness. They would watch the stars burn and grow and die in the blink of an eye. “A simple process of nuclear fusion,” they might say. As a new species took flight into the cosmos, it was just another Type II civilisation emerging, another small ripple in the pond. He supposed at one time, the Time Lords had looked upon the universe like the others did. They must have. They could never have bent space and peered into the Time Vortex if some Gallifreyan, somewhere, had not once looked to the sky and imagined themselves amongst those points of light, simply because they could. It was why he had such a fondness for the humans; most of the ones that he knew were from a messy, emergent time in their history, when their desire to redefine their world was still young and burned as brightly as a supergiant. But through all those millennia, long after the Time Lords had locked themselves away in their citadels and glass domes, their fire was never extinguished. They always wanted to do more, to be more, and although that urge could sometimes hurt others, and hurt themselves, he needed it more than anything. To let him see the stars through their eyes.

Missy was not a human, and when he was with her, he was remembered that while beautiful, a star was ultimately a process of destruction, and evolution the byproduct of extinction.

“This is silly,” she said scornfully, interrupting his slowly shifting thoughts. 

He looked over at her. She had perched her umbrella over her shoulder and her right leg dangled over her left into the void. Her hand lifted a cup of tea with her pinky extended in a perfect mockery of a human from the Victorian period, completely unbothered by the utter lack of rain in the vicinity of what would one day be Betelgeuse. “I suppose you’d like me to gaze in awe perhaps? Oh, Doctor, they’re ever so  _ pretty!  _ Well I can certainly see that I was wrong the whole time.”

“I’m not going to ask where you got that, and pretend that you haven’t dimensionally folded your pockets.” He frowned after a minute. “Does that dress even have pockets?”

Missy sighed dramatically. “The curses of conventional female clothing, dear. I’m sure you’ll find out one day.”

The Doctor knew full well that Missy would have designed her own clothing, not without custom Rigelian tailoring, dwarf star alloy woven into the finest material in the local supergroup, and of course at least 10 deadly weapons concealed on her person. That was his count so far: nine over 70 years in the vault, the blade of a tenth cutting into his damaged hand under the dying holographic sky of an endless spaceship. He did not pretend to himself to have found all of them. 

“I know that you’re trying,” he said quietly. “Maybe more than you let on. You betrayed yoursel- him- for me.” 

“What makes you think I did it for you, you sentimental old fool?”

The Doctor hesitated. “You said it was time for us to be friends again.”

“Oh yes, that.” She pulled out a small mirror, seemingly from nowhere. “Well it was  _ dreadfully _ cramped in that box.”

The silences always stretched a long time with her. The words fell from his mouth top-heavy, clumsy with the weight of millennia, and hung in the space between them like a pendulum at the nadir of its arc. But he had millennia more to give for her response, if necessary.

“Do you remember when we were boys?” he said finally.

Her pale blue eyes met his, and for a moment he was back on the Academy rooftop. “Every star,” she echoed.

“We could still see them. Us. Together,” he added desperately, immediately realising how much of an idiot he sounded.

Missy gestured vaguely to the disk of gas that swirled and coalesced in front of them. “Seen, done, got the t-shirt really. Nice little day trip, 3 out of 5, weather could’ve been better. Chips in the cafe were a bit cold.”

The Doctor sighed. “To be good-” he cringed a little at the pompous fool he must seem, but pressed on- “You have to see the value in the universe. What it’s worth doing it for. This system will be home to trillions of lives in the future, all with their own mundane, silly little dreams and hopes and tragedies. They’ll all be dust again one day and it’ll mean nothing, but to each one of them, their small window on the cosmos is the most important thing that ever happened. An ordinary life is the most beautiful and meaningful thing there is.”

“And that’s what you collect your little pet monkeys for, then?”

“Yes,” he muttered reluctantly. “I suppose it is.”

“Well,” she got up, folded her umbrella, and gathered her skirts neatly, “I’m not a monkey.”

 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

It wasn’t all contemplation. They travelled together more or less amicably, but it was slower with her. With his companions, it was always a lightning pace, a rush to see more, do more, and he never knew whether the haste was theirs or his own. Their little lives burned out so very quickly.

He didn’t look for distress signals anymore. The universe could get along without him, just for a little while. Look what good he’d done, him and his desperation for Missy to- what, exactly? To love him? To understand him? The Doctor spent more and more time under the console floor with every passing day. The TARDIS hummed quietly to herself, but he could never ask her thoughts- she kept her secrets to herself. One day, he heard sobbing echoing down the corridor, a sound like the organ being wrenched from a still-living body. He felt the weight of millenia pushing down upon him with every wracking cry, and against all his better instincts, he was transported back to a narrow bed, in a narrow room, and that moment that he had first known that he was not alone in his solitude.

He also knew, courtesy of David Bowie(nothing threw that man) and extreme boredom, that the TARDIS corridors were not acoustically optimal, and that a sound of approximately 70 decibels should not reasonably be able to reach his ear from that distance.

“Stop that,” he scolded her. “I know what she’s done. This is good. It means she’s working it out.”

The TARDIS gave a low trill of mockery.  _ I know you _ , that trill said.  _ I know your weakness, and I know what you’ll always do. Kindness. Davros was right, in the end. _

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

“Remember the Academy?” he asked, the next time they went travelling. He’d chosen a market planet- he thought the colour, the noise, the  _ life  _ might do something to stir the strange silent disquiet that had settled over the TARDIS of late.  

“‘Course ah do,” Missy said, deliberately thickening her already entirely out-of-place accent. Her eyes were blue, just as they’d been then. “Can’t very well forget old Borusa and the perigosto stick, can I?”

He couldn’t help but smile a little at the memory.  “I don’t mean like that.”

“Then what do you mean?”

The corner of his mouth quirked up, then down. “I don’t . . . I don’t know. Just forget it.”

There was so much vibrancy  _ here _ , in every corner- a temple welcoming people inside to offer tribute to the great god [untranslated: a large mauve blob roughly the size of a small planet] which made all things flow according to the ancient tradition. A gaseous ammonia-based lifeform contained in a small container on a cart angrily formed complex patterns, then reformed as its translator pattered out a string of obscenities directed at a hapless merchant. Most of these were almost completely incomprehensible to the average human not from Glasgow, even with the TARDIS translation circuit. “Belgium,” xe spat angrily, then whirred off. The Doctor winced at the strong language.

Delicacies of half a dozen biochemistries that were utterly incompatible with each other, some explosively, colour changing cloths, lubricant for molluscular beings, oils promising the brightest scales in the galaxy- it was all here. Normally the Doctor would want to get  _ involved _ , to see if he could eat siliconic fruit(he had, on a dare, to poor results), to be probably chased out by the market police(he hadn’t  _ known  _ it was blasphemy), to touch life in every shape and form(not literally; there were many species for which this would prove slightly dangerous to life and limb). But he didn’t, and for the first time, he saw how utterly pointless it was. 

The Doctor saw himself through Missy’s eyes- a madman in a box who travelled without purpose, for the love of a universe that did not love him back. And he saw how lonely it must seem.

“I got you in trouble, didn’t I?” she said, turning to look at him, really look at him, for the first time. He felt that familiar weight in his chest. “All those times. I let you take the blame, and you just . . .  _ let  _ me. It was so easy.”

He said nothing.

“Doctor?”

He knew that if he spoke, his voice would crack, and he hated himself for it. He’d used up more than a natural lifetime's’ worth of regenerations, but in so many ways he was still that little lost boy, humiliated and stung at the front of a classroom. It all came back to her, in the end. 

“You’ve got friends,” Bill had said, a long time ago. “Better ones.”

After the Mondas debacle, Bill had lost her taste for travelling. She’d continued to study under him, but like the others, she’d eventually moved on. 

“I’ve . . . got a uni place,” she’d told him awkwardly. “St Andrew’s. History.”

“History?” he had quirked an eyebrow. “You know all your human books are entirely wrong, of course.”

She’d grinned. “I know. But that’s it, innit? At school, we’d do all this, League of Nations and the Tudors and the Romans and all that. And some of that was pretty interesting, but after a while, I’d think, where are the people like me?”

The Doctor had shrugged. “History is written by the victors.”

“And travelling with you, was like . . . I dunno. The stuff in the history books, it’s not just  _ facts _ ,” Bill continued enthusiastically. “It’s also what people  _ thought  _ when they wrote it down, and they liked some parts, but other parts, they just sort of chucked in the bin. I want to be part of that. Finding the bits people threw away.” 

He had smiled fondly and pushed his chair away from the desk, but before he could even stand, her arms were around him.

“Thanks,” she had said into his shoulder, crushing his ribs. “Really, thanks, for everything. I never would’ve had a chance, you know? Foster kids, if we don’t end up out on the street or shooting up heroin we’re considered a success. But you respected me. Like, proper respect. You always listened, even if I was totally wrong. I’ve never had that before.”

“You always had it in you,” he’d told her, and he’d meant it. 

“Doctor?” she said, muffled.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t go travelling with Missy. She’s . . . not right.”

He’d stepped back and held her at arm’s length. “Missy can be good. She’s made progress.” 

Bill had taken a deep breath. “Doctor, at school, I had this friend. Girlfriend, actually. Anyway, she was alright at first. But she got in with a bad crowd, started drinking pretty heavily. Then she got into drugs. And she’d always have an excuse for it, and she’d make  _ me  _ make up excuses for her too. I’d lie about why she wasn’t in school. She had problems, I’m not denying it, and she probably should’ve gotten counselling or something. But I stayed with her for ages, because I’d convinced myself into thinking that she was the one. And there was only one other gay girl in my year, so y’know, if I broke up with her I wouldn’t have many choices-” Bill shook her head. “Anyway, that’s not important. The point is, I had to cut her off. She made her own decisions and if I stayed with her then she’d make me responsible. And that wasn’t fair to me.”

“And you’re saying that Missy’s like that.”

Bill had nodded reluctantly. “You don’t want to hear it, but- yeah. Yeah I am.” She folded her arms resolutely.

“Bill, with respect- you don’t understand what you’re talking about,” he recalled himself saying, robotically following the script of all her human ideas about unhealthy relationships, even then knowing how it sounded.

Bill had laughed, but without humour. “Do you hear yourself, mate?”

“Doctor,” Missy’s languid voice dragged him back through the centuries and across parsecs, to an unfamiliar marketplace filled with unfamiliar people and unfamiliar noises. “Can I show you something?”

 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

She took him by the hand, and led him back to the TARDIS. She plunged her fingers into the psychic interface, not surprising him: she’d always had a gift for telepathy, and had a distaste for his levers and gadgets: she called them “messy”. He watched her from the opposite railing. They’d been so beautiful, all of their regenerations, and every time his mind had touched theirs, he’d marvelled, even in his terror. The TARDIS shuddered, even as the Time Rotor began to spin smoothly. He wondered, not for the first time, why the TARDIS did not simply reject Missy. If he was being honest with himself(and Rule #1 applied to no one more than him), it was one of his reasons for keeping her on. If he was being really honest, he might admit that it seemed like one of Bill’s “excuses”. But to the TARDIS, time wasn’t linear. Perhaps she could see a future day where they piloted it together, side by side. Levers, ketchup dispensers and all. 

The TARDIS stopped with a dull clang.

He peered closer. “Lakshmi III,” he read off the monitor.

“So good they named it three times,” Missy drawled, but there was less resolution behind it than usual. Her hand shook.

“A human colony?” the Doctor asked. He knew he’d heard the name before: but colonies were usually dull places. Hardly worth visiting. 

Missy nodded. “Named after the goddess of luck from their religion. Ironic, isn’t it?”

“How do you mean?” asked the Doctor, already dreading the answer.

Missy opened the doors.

The regrettable thing about time travel was that when you didn’t do things in order, the universe had a tendency to inform you about things you’d rather avoid, and you might find yourself tripping up over your own gravestone. That one had happened to the Doctor a few too more times than he would’ve liked, once literally. 

On the reverse side, you could hear a story about a man being crushed by a falling piano, give it the brief grave consideration due to the failings of local governmental safety regulations, and several hours later look up to note a rather large object, growing larger by the second. You would then realise that the stranger had been wearing the same hat as you. 

“We did it with Borusa,” the Doctor said, his stomach threatening to crawl out of his mouth. “‘A perfect example of the violence commonly associated with less intelligent species.’” He imitated Borusa’s crisp multi-toned High Gallifreyan.

The landscape that lay before him was barren- the golden-grey grass strewn with rubble as far as the eye could see, under a toxic purple sky. Beyond that, the twisted, decayed towers of a cityscape from some forgotten nightmare stood like broken teeth. As of this minute, he was breathing the TARDIS’ air shell, but he knew that if he stepped beyond that, his lungs would absorb the complex synthetic molecules needed to refract the red light from the nearby star to that violent wavelength. The Geiger counter on the console set up a continuous beeping in the background. The Doctor absentmindedly moved a hand to mute it.

“Come on,” Missy said determinedly, pulling him out the doors. He didn’t fancy their chances for long in this place; but evidently, she wasn’t planning to stay for that long. His chest tightened in the poisoned air. 

“Look at it, Doctor,” she insisted.

“I’m looking.” He knew what had happened here now: war. Devastating, endless war, across an entire system.

“I mean really look at it,” she pulled at his arm again. Her voice was stronger and more direct than he had ever heard. “This is what I am, Doctor.”

“You-” He didn’t want to say it. Even though he  _ knew  _ she was capable, even though he’d  _ seen  _ her torture and kill on a whim. Still.

“I installed myself as a politician,” she went on mercilessly. “I rose through the ranks. It didn’t take much. These apes are ever so easy to manipulate.”

He cast his eyes to the poisoned sky, where even now the angry clouds threatened to boil over into a storm. He realised that there was none of the diversity of life commonly found on terraformed human colony planets- no birds chirping, only this spikey, tough, golden-grey grass, and the distant buzz of an insect swarm. 

“Tensions were high. I augmented them. I fed all of their worst fears, all their animal instincts, and they rewarded me. I got the head office. And then I took their rights away, bit by bit, and by the time they turned on and destroyed each other, it was almost  _ too easy.  _ I had a literal golden throne installed, did you know? Purely for the aesthetic. And I sat on that throne, and I laughed and laughed while the system burned around me.”

“That was- that was in the past,” he managed to say. “You can be redeemed. You could do so much good, with your brain. You could more than make up for it.” He thought he believed it too, even if he knew that the universe didn’t work like that- it wasn’t a neat scoring system, 5 points for a good deed, -5 for a bad one. 

“I supplied extra weapons, just for a wee bit more fun. Biological, chemical, nuclear. I nearly went for chronological ones, but I thought the Time Lords might get wind.”

“They said it was just humans. Just stupid apes, getting it wrong again,” the Doctor recalled dimly, for lack of anything else to say.

She turned, and there were tears in her eyes. Her always-blue eyes. “This is what I do, Doctor. This is what I always do, and I’ll always let you down.”

“No-”

“This could never last, could it? Face it: you don’t have the attention span. You couldn’t even keep me in the Vault for a century. You couldn’t even leave me to my punishment.  _ Why  _ didn’t you _? _ ”

“Because you’re my friend,” he said simply. “You always have been, and you always will be. And I can see the good in you. Just the fact that you’re saying this-”

She stopped him. “It’s been good, hasn’t it? Being friends. Eating terrible ‘Chinese’ food. Whatever else those Earthlings do that you count as ‘friendship’. But it’s not for us. Your little pet Burr-”

“Bill-” corrected the Doctor automatically, knowing full well that she never forgot anything.

“-was right. It’s time you stopped making excuses for me.”

She turned away.

_ How did she know? _

“I’m an expert mind-reader, dear,” she called over her shoulder. “And you really might want to get back inside, the weapons I bought were outlawed by at least five major interplanetary alliances, and I think it’s going to rain soon. Rassilon knows what’s in that water.”

“But where are you going?” the Doctor yelled desperately after her, the wind whipping his hair about his face. 

“I left a vortex manipulator in my office . . . Don’t bother to run after me dear, it’ll look ridiculous.”

He ran anyway, arms flailing, boots catching in the tough grass, because there was simply no other option. Not to him. “No!” he shouted. “I can help you! I know I can! Koschei!”

The most dangerous man in the universe, the Oncoming Storm, the Shadow of the Valeyard, the Last Tree of Garsennon stood alone on a dead planet, screaming uselessly at a dead violet sky. He felt like crying, and wondered vaguely if he had forgotten how. 

 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

The TARDIS knew him well; she landed him smack-dab in 21st century Earth, Sheffield. According to all the known laws of causality(most of which, at complete odds with their title, had no apparent cause at all), a place ripe for alien invasion. He keyed in the coordinates, forced the lever down(having been met with resistance unusual for a joint just recently oiled), and appeared in an uninhabited corner of the Orion Nebula. Earth would be there, waiting, but not just yet. This body was ancient. He was tired of this regeneration, tired of feeling these things over and over again, tired of the humans and their stupid short life cycles. One person would last forever to him, even after losing his home- but she was gone. 

He felt that something had gone wrong, somewhere in the past. It was his fault, of course. Always, with this regeneration.

Why was it always his fault?


End file.
